Buildkite vs Harness comparison

Buildkite and Harness are both solutions in the Build Automation category. Buildkite is ranked #9 with an average rating of 8.2, while Harness is ranked #10 with an average rating of 7.8. Buildkite holds a 1.6% mindshare in BA, compared to Harness’s 7.8% mindshare. Additionally, 92% of Buildkite users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Harness users who would recommend it.

Buildkite

Read 14 Buildkite reviews

394 Views
394 Comparison Views

92% willing to recommend

Harness

Read 4 Harness reviews

2,431 Views
2,091 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Buildkite

Harness

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 5, 2025

Harness and Buildkite are competing products in continuous integration and delivery. Data comparisons suggest Buildkite holds a slight edge in flexibility and scalability, while Harness is favored for its intuitive automation capabilities.

Features: Harness is known for automated deployment pipelines, centralized logging, and support for complex workflows. Buildkite offers customizable pipelines, superior control over build environments, and flexibility.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Harness provides a cloud-based deployment model, simplifying setup with proactive customer support. Buildkite uses a hybrid model, allowing infrastructure control but requiring more technical setup. Its service emphasizes responsiveness, though it might need more technical assistance.

Pricing and ROI: Harness offers a flexible pricing model focused on cost-effective automation, leading to a favorable ROI by reducing time and resources in manual processes. Buildkite's competitive pricing is favored by larger enterprises who prioritize control and customization, with potential for higher initial costs offset by tailored deployments.

To learn more, read our detailed Buildkite vs. Harness Report (Updated: July 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Buildkite vs. Harness

July 2025

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Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Categories and Ranking

Buildkite

Ranking in Build Automation

9th

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.5

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Harness

Ranking in Build Automation

10th

Average Rating

7.8

Reviews Sentiment

7.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Static Application Security Testing (SAST) (27th), Cloud Cost Management (12th)

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Build Automation category, the mindshare of Buildkite is 1.6%, up from 0.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Harness is 7.8%, up from 4.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Build Automation

Featured Reviews

Prabin Silwal

Senior Engineering Consultant at ASSURANCE IQ, INC.

Has an easy setup phase while also offering good documentation

The problem we are facing sometimes is that we have lots of unit testers, and we have to wait about ten minutes to complete all of those because we want to run or find a way. It's not directly due to the limitation of the tool as well, but when we are running the spec, we want to run those parallelly and decrease the downtime so that our deployment can be faster. I think that one is not possible only due to the it also depends upon the unit test framework as well we are using. When we tried with the multiple test cases in a parallel manner, there were some dependencies, and one over another kept failing. We make those sequential calls. The aforementioned area consists of the issues my company faced while using Buildkite.

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Linwei Yuan

Software Engineer at Citi

Streamline microservices deployment with integrated execution pipelines and comprehensive monitoring

Harness integrates all functions like execution pipelines, environment checks, and log monitoring in one place. It is very convenient since we have many microservices, so having one platform for all of them is beneficial. The dashboard allows me to monitor all core services' deployment status in one place, making it easier to find bugs and check logs.

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Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"Buildkite makes it easier to conduct deployment. When I merge a PR in Buildkite, it automatically starts the deployment process. It used to be challenging to shift code from the development branch to the testing branch because I had to follow up with multiple developers. Previously, I was dependent on the DevOps team and developers to handle deployments, but now it allows me to deploy the solutions myself.This has made it much easier for me to handle both non-production and production environments."

"They have great plugins, scalability, UI, and pipeline options. They also offer webhooks that allow integration with custom setups to send events dynamically."

"The tool is simple and has no learning curve. If you know YAML, you can master it. It is simple to learn."

"The documentation is quite helpful."

"Buildkite allows us to build automations and integration tasks effectively."

"What I like best about Buildkite is its workflow management. You define YAML files to specify what needs to be done. The jobs can run based on a schedule, like a cron job, where you set it to run every night or every week. Additionally, you can set up triggers, such as new pushes to a repository."

"Buildkite's UI is particularly intuitive, making it simple to add steps to your pipeline. It also provides detailed logging."

"The product's initial setup phase was easy."

More Buildkite pros

"The features of Harness are valuable, supporting rolling deployments, basic deployments, and blue-green deployments with zero downtime."

"Harness integrates all functions like execution pipelines, environment checks, and log monitoring in one place, making it convenient."

"Harness starts integrating with organizations, making everything automated without the need for manual interruption."

"It's a highly customizable DevOps tool."

"Harness integrates all functions like execution pipelines, environment checks, and log monitoring in one place."

Cons

"My company has had problems with the tool's parallel running and execution time. The testing framework also has some limitations. The tool cannot do everything."

"Based on the load, the agents can be scaled up and scaled down, and while they are scaling up, sometimes they just get stuck."

"Buildkite has issues while creating or extending branches as only the first five builds in the user-interface can be accessed and post that one has to access the next builds by remembering branch names without pagination which can be inconvenient."

"Most of our projects involve both front-end and back-end development. We write the code and then create a file to set up our process, including specifying the tests we want to run. Before deploying to production, we need to install and configure certain things. We need something like Docker Pro, but I'm unsure about that. I'm familiar with the steps for using Buildkite for this process. We start by defining which tests to run."

"The solution should offer more options for installing an agent and give users the option of having a separate self-hosted or provisioned agent."

"Since we were using Buildkite for the first time, we had a lot of difficulty understanding how it worked. We didn't find any documentation from third parties; only Buildkite provided documentation. As a result, we faced a steep learning curve. After some time, it became much easier to use. Initially, understanding certain features, like the R integration, was challenging."

"It gets very complex if you want the tool to scale automatically."

"There is a need for rework occasionally, and issues like syntax errors can occur multiple times, especially when manual changes are made in AWS or Amazon Connect that are not captured in the code."

More Buildkite cons

"I prefer the previous less compact UI version of Harness, which showed more details on the screen."

"When deploying multiple components to multiple environments, like production and BCP, failures sometimes occur. Improvements are needed when deploying one component to one environment."

"Even with automation, there's a requirement for manual change requests for approvals."

"There's also room for improvement in debugging pipeline issues, which can sometimes become complex."

"When integrating Harness with more than twenty applications in one place, it becomes less stable, causing improvements to be necessary."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution's per-user pricing model suits huge enterprises but is expensive for small to medium businesses."

"The self-hosted option is pretty cheap."

"We used the solution’s free version."

"I don't think the tool is expensive."

"Buildkite is known to be cheaper than GitHub Workflows, which is considered a standard in the industry. It can be cost-effective, especially for organizations that heavily utilize Docker and containerization, because every code change triggers a new build. Its integration with AWS, particularly with ECR, and its caching capabilities with layers are powerful features."

"For a business plan, it was 19 USD per month per user."

"I find Buildkite cost-effective as it has definitely increased my productivity, especially on the deployment side. It saved a lot of my time and improved data management because I can handle different environments myself now."

Information not available

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

No data available

Financial Services Firm

32%

Computer Software Company

11%

Government

Retailer

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Buildkite?

One area that needs improvement in Buildkite is the requirement for rework of the code. There can be syntax errors when running the Buildkite pipeline, especially if someone has made manual changes...

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What is your primary use case for Buildkite?

I use Buildkite for deployment tasks related to building AMI images and deploying routing profile queues into Amazon Connect. This involves using Buildkite in conjunction with GitHub. We create fil...

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What advice do you have for others considering Buildkite?

With two years of experience on Buildkite, I would recommend it to others due to its manageable pipeline and the support team available for big issues. I am satisfied with it, rating its stability ...

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What do you like most about Harness?

It's a highly customizable DevOps tool.

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What needs improvement with Harness?

When deploying multiple components to multiple environments, like production and BCP, failures sometimes occur. Improvements are needed when deploying one component to one environment.

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Harness?

Our primary use case for Harness ( /products/harness-reviews ) is as a deployment tool. Although I am not a DevOps engineer, my team uses Harness ( /products/harness-reviews ) for deployment purpos...

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Comparisons

GitHub Actions vs Buildkite

Compared 34% of the time

Tekton vs Buildkite

Compared 15% of the time

GitLab vs Buildkite

Compared 13% of the time

Nx vs Buildkite

Compared 12% of the time

JFrog Pipeline vs Buildkite

Compared 10% of the time

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GitHub Actions vs Harness

Compared 18% of the time

Jenkins vs Harness

Compared 18% of the time

TeamCity vs Harness

Compared 11% of the time

Tekton vs Harness

Compared 10% of the time

CloudBees vs Harness

Compared 3% of the time

More Harness Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Buildkite

August 2025

Download Buildkite product report

Buyer's Guide

Build Automation

July 2025

Download Harness product report

Also Known As

No data available

Armory

Overview

Buildkite is a powerful CI/CD tool praised for its scalability and flexibility in automating and managing complex workflows across multiple platforms. Its integration capabilities with various systems and supports for secure, customizable environments enhance development efficiency and data privacy. The feedback highlights significant boosts in productivity and operational cost reduction, making Buildkite a strategic asset for businesses aiming to streamline development tasks and align with organizational goals.

Buildkite

Harness offers a comprehensive toolset for automating deployment processes and enhancing software update efficiency. It's lauded for its CI/CD capabilities, feature flagging, and real-time deployment monitoring. Key features include an intuitive UI, secret management, and robust rollback functionalities, all contributing to improved productivity and reduced errors in DevOps environments.

Harness

Sample Customers

Information Not Available

Linedata, Openbank, Home Depot, Advanced

Buyer's Guide

Buildkite vs. Harness

July 2025

Free Report: Buildkite vs. Harness

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